Art and Literature from the Collection of Artine Artinian

November 28, 2017 by Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Daniel Rechtschaffen, ’18, and Pamela Fletcher, professor of art history, study works from the Artine Artian collection during the summer of 2017.

Artine Artinian (1907–2005) was a graduate of Bowdoin College, Class of 1931, and a leading scholar of the nineteenth-century French author, Guy de Maupassant. During his tenure on the Bard College faculty, Artinian acquired Maupassant’s original manuscripts and anthologized the author’s numerous short stories in English, all the while developing another significant collection: nineteenth- and twentieth-century French drawings and portraits. For decades, he accumulated several thousand works of art, some of which he himself commissioned.

Opening on January 19, 2018, the exhibition Where the Artist’s Hand Meets the Author’s Pen: Drawings from the Artine Artinian Collection, offers a sampling of the many drawings Artinian donated to Bowdoin College in 2005. Most of the works in the exhibition exist at the intersection where the artist’s hand meets the author’s pen, acting as testaments to both Artinian’s passion for the visual arts and his preoccupations as a literary scholar. Such works include original book illustrations, social and political caricatures, artistic portraits, and sketches by nineteenth- and twentieth-century French authors.

Daniel Rechtschaffen, class of 2018, and guest curator for Where the Artist’s Hand Meets the Author’s Pen: Drawings from the Artine Artinian Collection, at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.